Alexander Lange Kielland

Alexander Lange Kielland (1849–1906) was a Norwegian novelist and short-story writer, counted with Ibsen, Bjørnson and Lie among the four great writers of his country's nineteenth century. The son of a wealthy merchant family of Stavanger, he ran a brickworks before publishing his first collection of Novelletter in 1879, followed by the novels Garman and Worse, Skipper Worse and Poison, which attacked the pietism, school system and commercial hypocrisy of his class in an elegant, ironic prose influenced by French models. Parliament twice refused him a writer's pension on account of his radicalism. He stopped writing fiction in 1891 and served as mayor of Stavanger and county governor of Romsdal.